Manage your subscription

Our working weeks have gradually got shorter

From
Shelley Charik, London, UK

Richard Mellish claims that the working week hasn't grown shorter as predicted by the economist John Maynard Keynes (Letters, 24 November 2018).

According to figures collected by Michael Huberman and Chris Minns for a 2007 article in Explorations in Economic History, full-time production workers around the world worked for 64 hours a week on average in 1870, but this steadily fell to around 40 in 2000. It seems to me this shows that Keynes was right.

The figures for males in 2000 range from 36.9 hours in France and Spain to 43.3 in the US. Huberman and Minns attribute …